Feedback on the Mainland

If this applies only to transactions involving the landowner, then all transactions would take place in malls (like the one my alt would set up, to sell my items exclusively ). On the other hand, if a resident gets taxed for anybody's transactions that take place on their land... well, there's a nice little extortion plot next door, and my alt and I like to sell each other extraordinarily pricey plywood boxes, over and over and over...

Can I buy one of your plywood boxes.

I will put a texture on it and sell it back to you perhaps we can up the price a bit then.
LOL

whois.com this is public information and should be known to anyone that wants to investigate if a website is legit or not I think the SL world deserves the heads up!!!

Okay. Woooo - slow down eveyrbody. I have followed this with some interest BUT this whole thread is losing control. Get back on track.
What do avatars think of a Nanny State?
Where are we going?
Who is going to police us?
YOU? - LIndens? You claim you built this place - can't we play in your sandbox? Or is it by roles only? Rememeber that this "imagination" you apparantly support means freedom - you prepared to allow that?

Not to pick out any one poster, but the concept of "imagination means freedom" is worthy of comment.

If you were to carry that idea to its logical conclusion, you could say that there is NO imagination in the non-virtual (AKA 'real') world---because no one has complete freedom. We all live with laws and social contracts and rules of various kinds.

My point is that imagination does not require the complete absence of rules/restrictions, in order to exist and flourish.

The question is, where is the optimal place to draw the line-- what rules/restrictions will create the greatest enjoyment of SL while producing the least amount of unhappiness.

And that line will exist in a different place for each one of us. So all the Lindens can do is try to guess at the best placement.

LL ( the Lindens) supplied the hardware and software, they did not build this place,

SL was built almost entirely by the customers, the people who pay money for the use of the software and hardware supplied by LL. All content in SL belongs to the customers, LL are licenced to use the content that we have made here, they do not however, own it.

Conversely, we the customers do not own the "land" that we build on, we do own however, a licence to use the server space which has been designated " land" for as long as we continue to pay the server rental fees, and work within the operating terms set out by the hardware and software owners ( LL).

The owners of the hardware and software have a duty to supply the equipment and software in a state that is useable for the purpose for which the customer has paid, ( UK trading standards apply ).

That as far as I can see is the problem, I have never seen anywhere a document written that states exactly what Linden Lab promises to supply for the fees paid.
As far as I am aware, all they have to supply is useable software and hardware.

Could anyone enlighten me on this please?

OK, that said, why should LL help the customers.

there really is only one reason, good customer relations means that customers will stay with the company, and will spend money with the company.
Customer service is not something that a company has just to be liked, they have a customer service department to ensure that the customers are happy to continue spending money with them.

In any normal company this would mean that the customer always comes first, however, SL ( LL ) is not a normal company, it has been for a long time a partnership between the providers and the customers, hence the term "residents" was adopted to make the customers feel a part of the team.

It has now come to a point where LL must decide whether to keep this model or to change to a more normal customer / provider relationship.

It seems that they are trying to keep both models running side by side, allowing the customers to have their say here, while behind closed doors making the policies that they will follow.

This is due mainly to the fact that they have decided that the " early addopters " phase is almost over, they still want us to feel a part of the team, but are now at the stage in the company where they want to take full control into the companies hands.

This will mean that, while they allow us a measure of control, or apparent control, they will now be guiding everything from the policies decided in the board room.

There is nothing that we can do about this as customers. but we have to now start thinking of ourselves as customers, with customers rights.

We are paying for a service, we expect that service to be as stated. The only power we now truly have is the power to take our money out of the company.


I may be wrong, but I am fairly sure that I am not.

If "Nanny State" means a place where there are clearly-stated rules applied by a legitimate authority whose purpose is to prevent the greedy few from spoiling the experience of the many, then yes, I'm all for it. Sign me up!

I suppose if your name is Liana Linden, you can add your own nominations for this 'top' Linden Lab award 1 full month "after" nominations were closed.

Looks like this award is rigged......


http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1304

In RL, I have protected ISP customers against SPAM for at least the past 15 years. And, just like in SL, every time a new anti-spam tactic is made, the spammers come up with a way to circumvent it. For example, text content can be easily filtered, so, what did the spammers do? Create embedded JPG's of the SPAM. The anti-spammers filtered for the check sum of the JPG's, so what did the spammers do? Introduce random pixelation into the JPG's.

Spam only works because of the enormous amounts of it and the small return. I wont show the math, but imagine a .001% investment return on something that cost hardly anything to advertise if a million spam messages are sent.

People DO complain. The problem with LL is they do not make it easy enough to complain. For example, (and I am not an AOL subscriber), all one has to do is click the "This Is Spam" button on their webmail and AOL automatically sends a message to the ISP of the spam email IP origination's [email]abuse@whaterver.com[/email] or whatever is registered with AOL's feedback system to notify the originating ISP that there was possible spam. It is then up to me to decide if the message is spam or not.

To decide if it's spam or not? Most cases, it is obvious. Sometimes it is not. But in all cases, people do not like spam but have become so jaded to it they just deleted it by glancing at the subject line and never even opening it.

Unfortunately, with SL add farm spam, we can't just make it go away.

However, there is hope, as 16sqm's I've AR'ed in the past for land extortion have been taken care of in less than 1 day, just recently.

And, don't forget the panic that set in on the add farmers on Feb. 13th's announcement about add farms. They were running around removing their SPAM and removing their extortionistic prices for land. And, =many= citizens were ARing the ad farms as well. I even remember one extortionist R. M. had updated his SL profile to say he was working as fast as he can and please don't AR me!

For this imminent SECOND ROUND against add farmers and extortionists, it will be just the same. Get ready! You're time is going to come, very soon.

That just cost you any credibilty you might have retained. Hey, Where'd he go... Oh, never mind, I hear an ambulance in the distance....

Any Data sent to the viewer was copyable long before copybot came along, and still is. Textures are in your cache as well.

And that is the part I don't get. If I go to the effort of putting a spam filter on my computer, or wall up on my property to block an ad, why would anyone think that getting around that filter, or putting up a blazing partical beam I would have to see, would make me a customer??? I boycott ALL MERCHANTS - RL or SL, WHO ADVERTISE ON AD PARCELS, and I IM, notecard or email to inform them of that when I see their ads. I AR anyone who drops a notecard, object or group invite on me that I did not either request or okay. I am NOT a customer to any unsolicted adverts.

The ad farms are garbage and need to be gone. Streaming particles off your property to advertise needs to be gone. There is a decent venue here called the Classifieds provided for advertising. That is where all advertising that is not business collocated needs to be. Getting rid of the crap will hopefully get rid of the majority of the view blocking walls as well.

And the last time, for clarity; I do not advocate removing the ability of someone to lock down their property WHILE THEY ARE ON IT!!

I do however advocate changing how it works so it is not a wall, but a delayed eviction, so that ppl and vehicles may pass across or through a parcel. There have been some great suggestions on how this could be done. This would elimate the need for the banlines completely, but still give those whose desired privacy what they want, though granted, reduced a fraction from how it is now. And tort or no tort, get over it. It isn't real, and there is no real privacy.

I truly like the mainland, I don't want to be restricted to the confines of a 256x256 meter island to use SL, that was never for me what it was about. But I am so dissappointed in LL's lack of action on the adfarms, land bots, and land management, that I may not be here much longer. I came in because of the potential I saw. I used to really look forward to loging in. Not so much anymore. Sadly, much of that seems to be gone, replaced by sex parlors and ad signs, and ppl who don't give a crap about those around them, or what SL really could be.

Jack said this thread would be closed, and some answers forthcoming... I am sorry Jack, but if you don't have the time to devote to this as you stated, why did you even start it?

Sad, truly truly sad.
DRD

This is my policy as well.

Obviously if everyone followed it, no more giant spinning ads would assault our eyes. As you say, the Classified's are the proper place to advertise (though of course there could be some improvements there, too.)

Read post 937, I believe there is the answer to that question, sadly.

/me sympathises

Some people end up doing exactly this because they get can far more for their now totally unenjoyable parcel which they wont even get 4L per m for as a block because no one looking for a parcel of size 512m or more to enjoy, will touch it.

So it gets chopped by the discouraged owner and flicked to the bots. Why? Well you can easily average out at 5L per m from the micro-parcel bots and the human camp-followers who blindly chase them, and be gone from that hellhole within the hour. And 7-8L if you manage your exit over a day or two.

You can get a really nice 512m parcel in another part of the grid for 2500L-3500L with great neighbours with the microbot owners money. And given what people have been subjected to under the current light-handed land management regime, I don't blame them one little bit when they do this. The microbot owners did this to extort them. I think it only fair that they pay for their intended victim to move to a much nicer place =) And they do, because many of the bot programs are dumb as. Well, as dumb as the amateur wannabe programmers who wrote them anyways.

And if anyone reading this thinks this is a terrible idea then please reach into your own deep pockets and buy rm's totally unenjoyable parcel at 5-6L per m, or dig into your land bank and swap rm a nice parcel for it. And everyone else in the same boat as rm.

If not, then rm will just have to best do whatever it takes to get out of the mess that rm didnt create, under the regime we have now.


Regime:

The regime has to change, if only because this kind of behaviour and action is sucky and shouldn't even have to be considered by otherwise decently ordinary people. Its simply unsustainable, nevermind unforgiveable to put people into this situation.

Without substantial changes then LL will quit the mainland landlord business by atrophy. Because they won't have any new tenants in sufficient numbers replacing those who have taken off for other estates and worlds. There will always be mainland, True. And there will always be an England too. Its just that song doesn't mention the Empire that once was.

If LL were to divide itself into two separate companies; A systems backbone provider (software, hardware,etc) and a completely separate service provider company. A service provider company that then managed and sold the services to us, the customers. That way the service company is focussed on us, their customers. And like any service provider, ISPs for example, they have SLAs in place that penalise the line companies when the services they have contracted for aren't delivered. We the end customers, benefit enormously from those.

Actually, more than one service provider would be great. Nothing like a bit of competition to keep everyone focussed and costs under control. There are any number of people who have posted here who would definitely be keen on owning and managing a piece of one those. Would beat private estate management under the current regime any day =)

I have only been on Second Life for 4 months, so I'm a relatively new resident. That said, as soon as I decided that owning land was something that interested me, paid for a premium account and started looking for my first 512 plot, I ended up on a trail of breadcrumbs that lead directly into the debate over ad farms and lil size 16 "micro-plots". I couldn't afford any of the 512 plots I found, so I after scouring through the classifieds for cheap property, I came up with three plots that in total equaled 512 sq - that sold for 700 lindens, 700 lindens and 900 lindens respectively.

One was in the middle of a nice well forested area in Colburg and had a nice forest on it and a covenant that it was an ad-free zone. I bought it and built my first house there. Then I met Rem Nightfire because he has land over there and got invited to Ad Zoo. Now that land is art gallery. Another one was sitting in the middle of an ad farm/Ad Zoo war over in Deepscale, and had a few neighbors (mostly residential or artist/residents) and a bunch of ads, "micro-plots" some sporting garrish banlines, ad blocking walls, and more and more of the aforementioned. It had one three prim object that said "Ad Farms Destroy Sims" on it. I built the office for an arts coop there, and well, it was ugly as hell, and so eventually the property values there started dropping and dropping, so I picked up more land there at that was going for 3000 to 5000 L for 1024 sq. As far as I know, that's about 1/2 the current market value on mainland. And I built a nice Arts Coop there and in neighboring Milehouse, so artists live and work there and put on music performances and things. And one day I looked up and saw that so many people had moved in and bought pretty things that the coastline and water the Lindens had put placed at the end of Milehouse was now visible from most of the two story windows at Kuumba Arts Cooperative. And I was happy.

The third land is a very small art museum that used to be in the middle of a lot of porn ads, til a guy bought up most of it put a nice village there.

So I read the plan - to zone the new mainland, and create residential, commercial, and advertising free zones, and these are my thoughts:

1) I have no personal complaint about the Linden Labs plan to try this with the new mainland - not existing mainland. It is how things work in real life. New buildings go up on formerly vacant unincorporated areas outside of a city or county, as the area expands, and the inner-city may give way to urban blight. If it does, later that issue might be addressed. It's addressed later because it truly is more complex. The complexity comes from the fact that it is already inhabited. Therefore, it is my opinion that it is a sensible idea to see how a new program works in currently uninhabited areas, so that the Lindens can debug it there before attempting any revised version on existing mainland.

2) I do not miss what was said in the initial posting regarding the Linden's desire to stabilize real estate prices on mainland. To my knowledge, the median is about 3000-5000L for 512, depending on the area, but there is a lot of variation as owners may either be jacking up the price artificially, or lowering it for a quick sale. I have mixed feelings about regulating it. If I had not been able to find a 700 linden plot of land large enough to build rudimentary shelter on (I think it was 214) I would not have had the experience of learning about why I would want my own land, and not just to rent an apartment in a skyrise or a skybox as most of my fellow new resident friends do, without ever needing to go premium. 5000L is a good chunk of change for your average noob. Regulating it might get rid of the cheap land that can be found - well, only on the mainland. So I will wait and see what happens.

3) Nobody wants to see a bunch of gigantic billboards tossed up in the middle of Griffith Park or Golden Gate Parks, and they do limit the number of billboards in residential neighborhoods. In Hawaii, they limit the height of high rise buildings because they do not want the buildings to dwarf the mountains. I think that zoning regulations make a lot of sense for all the above mentioned reasons. They keep the structures from overwhelming the land - except for in the deeply urban areas where you would want the buildings to overwhelm the land.

Oh, and my neighbor at the coop has zero security on his land, which is a cool graveyard. Anyone can build on it, and he doesn' have it set to autoreturn objects people build there, and anyone can build there.

So some idiot went over there and dumped a dozen huge boxes that say "SecondLife.. because your first life sucks" on them all over the top of the land.

That is very annoying.

I own oceanfront and have good neighbors for my rentals on the mainland. However, I rent on an island because I like all the rules of the private estates. The mainland has become a junkyard. I am glad they are going to make it nice. I would like to see roads and residental areas. It's why in RL we have HOA's to control the neighbors.

With the casino ban, the bank ban and the ageplay ban, there were outside pressures forcing LL's hand. No one outside of their customers is asking for the removal of ad farms. Don't look for it to ever happen across the entire Mainland. I'm a little more optimistic they can come up for a solution for ban lines, but the same could be said for those too.

It makes sense that LL would want some areas to look nicer than others. Especially those that happen to be new sims that fetch new money at auction and additional tier.

Until there are monetary or legal pressures to clean up the entire mainland, the majority of it is going to look exactly as it does now.

Apologies if this has been brought up before - but what are the pros and cons of bringing back the First Land scheem? If I had not been able to buy my first plot for 512 L$ and learn ao very much by creating on it, I would never have bought more. In fact, I doubt that I would still be a customer now, after nearly 2 years, if I had not got started in that small way. I wonder how many others feel similarly to myself about this?

[I like your signature quote Ray - very Buddhist.]

Since SL isn't going to implement large scale zoning just yet, one solution to all the extortionate land sale problems in the short term would be to make an application of intent to sell to LL mandatory before the property could be put on sale. It may not be on sale during the time LL is processing the request and any sale signage put up prematurely will result in an IP ban and confiscation without compensation. Upon approval of the sale, LL would stipulate certain guidelines for how the property will be advertised and it will also have the power to negotiate the final selling price with the owner. Failure to heed their guidelines will result in confiscation of the land without compensation. The seller would also be IP banned. In addition, any groups of people affiliated with any bogus land extortion scheme would be banned, too. They could also write it into the covenant when any new or pre-existing land is sold that TOS violations regarding land sale and use would be subject to an extra month's tier charge as part of the punishment. In addition, no land would be allowed to be parceled off for a price for the first six months of possession of it for brand new landowners.

This is a far simpler solution that can be a stopgap until they devise a cohesive zoning strategy, which, god only knows how long that will take.

As for advertising generally, it should be banned. LL already has classified ads as well as the keyword search in places and that is good enough. When I look for stuff I want to buy, I use the search engine anyway and can't remember ever buying anything in SL due to some sign I saw while in world.

Finally, I don't really care how big the total land area is for SL. LL has to come up with an efficient, fair way to police it. As consumers, it isn't our job to care about how they are going to make it possible. Just do it.

People were taking advantage of it by creating alt accounts and flipping first land when land prices were high and LL used that as an excuse to stop the offering. The main reason it will never return is because it's not profitable for the company.

Thanks on the quote comment. Eckhart Tolle is as Buddhist as a Westerner gets. His teachings are profound.

It is difficult to think of alternatives that would not destroy the free market in land. Maybe some sort of Land Mart - bit like the Lindex, that matched buyers and sellers??? Just thinking out loud here.

What no one seems to have mentioned is the ineffective way LL have set up how new players get land to start with. Re premium accounts, I really don't understand why there isn't a method to be provided with 512 meters of land with your premium together, offer an option to pay the premium with the basic cost of land added in, you could even make it cost 10% over the going 'base rate' and allow that payment to be made in with the premium account per month, per six months, or per year. It's nothing more than buying a web site really is it?

I'd almost totally written off the mainland as unusable before I saw this thread, although my reasons aren't so much as parcel based (as I own no land (yet)), as script based.

When LL implemented infinite-height banlines and no-object-entry for parcels, it pretty much killed off my pet project, which was a toy boat that would sail around bodies of water by itself, the problem being that there is no way to detect by script if a certain coordinate disallows entry for the object running the script.

Another problem is that llEdgeOfWorld works in a line from a given position, and again can't give an exact coordinate as being off-world or not. I can understand how not being able to check global coords for a sim can't be done, but it would at least be nice to check a coordinate relative to the object (with the option for it being relative to the axis of the object).

If two functions were added to LSL to let me make those checks, working on things that move around on the mainland would be a lot easier for everybody.




Also allowing changing the ground texture on your own parcel would be nice.

And more nice looking communal hang-out places like the Waterhead welcome area

I think its a great idea, long time coming. maybe the issue of land usage and building types should be addressed. You buy a nice beach front plot, build a nice beach house surrounded by other beach front properties, and it looks like paradise till somebody comes along and dumps a huge medieval castle there. then your land value plumets. Nothing against people that want to live in a SL castle, but hey lets have them in the right surroundings